To all of you who got the disease, best wishes for a quick and healthy recovery. For those who have not been infected, please try to stay safe.
Have you tested positive for COVID?
- Thread starter Wookie
- Start date
Please register or login
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
- Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
- A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
- You can make this box go away
It was obvious you had an agenda from the question. My post was a follow up to another poster’s reply to someone questioning the pharm industry and the past history of drugs and vaccines. Of course the past is no guarantee for the future but it does show the safety record of the system.
Is it proven to be absolutely safe? Of course not. No new drugs are. That is why there is post market surveillance. For vaccines in the US it’s VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System). The system is there because we know that adverse events can and do happen. That is not unique to vaccines. It is simply not possible to know all the potential issue that may arise prior to a drug’s release.
It is reasonable to be concerned and to question if vaccination is right for you. All drugs have a risk/benefit ratio, even Tylenol. But just making a blanket statement that a vaccine is not safe based on the “Fast track” process is not reasonable nor is looking to FB and social media for your answers. Added to this is the fact that there has never before been a vaccine with this level of scrutiny by the public, media and health care. Everyone is watching the development.
Research works in phases. Phase 1 tests safety on a small group of healthy volunteers. Phase 2 expands the testing and begins to evaluate effectiveness. Phase 3 further expands the number and baseline health of test subjects and provides more data on safety, less common side effects and efficacy. Only then is the vaccine presented for approval. All three phases were completed by Pfizer.
The primary end point (goal) of Pfizer’s study was efficacy against Covid 19. The secondary end point was efficacy against severe infection. These end points were selected because they are the critical factors for this vaccine. All while monitoring safety and adverse events.
As for ability to infect others post vaccination. Yes, we in healthcare wish Pfizer had been able to include this end point during the trials but lack of this info should not preclude getting vaccinated and expectations (and a bit of other trial evidence) are that ability to infect will be reduced, just as it is with other vaccines. But we can’t say it as a fact just yet since it wasn’t part of the trial.
There is absolutely no way to know how long the immunity will last until follow up on recipients shows reduced immunity. Should we hold vaccination until we have that answer? What if it lasts years? At what point do we decide it is worthwhile? There is some evidence that immunity may last years but we just don’t know yet. So sure, this is one factor to consider in an individual’s risk/benefit analysis.
Do I worry about future adverse events? Of course, as with any new medication. But not because of the fast track approach nor the novel mRNA. In fact, personally I am excited by mRNA benefits and the very fact it does not require actual viral proteins or growth culture.
As I mentioned before, I worry more about the spike protein itself and the bodies’s innate response but this is no different with any potential vaccine and even more so with the illness itself.
OP
Wookie
Proud to be a Chaos Muppet
Staff member
ScubaBoard Business Sponsor
ScubaBoard Supporter
Scuba Instructor
Yes. Yesterday it was reading 86, so I went on in. The hospitals Pulse Ox read 95 all day.
tarponchik
Contributor
Tylenol (Paracetamol, Acetaminophen etc) is a strange choice for a poster-boy of medications because it is generally agreed that its therapeutic index is narrow (though exact numbers I've seen range from 2.5 to 10), liver damage being the most common side effect. Use of Paracetamol during pregnancy has been linked to autism.
Another very time-consuming problem with most human trials is finding qualified study subjects. My wife was an oncology research RN at UCSD. It was a problem recruiting patients that would qualify (exactly the right kind of cancer), had or had not been exposed to certain treatments, met health & history parameters, and was willing to participate. Even something as common as breast cancer took years to find enough patients for studies.
It also takes a lot of time to entice medical institutions to participate as study sites. Aside from negotiating the money side of the deal, finding research oriented docs that are interested is challenging. It wasn't unusual to only have 3 sites for many of the studies my wife worked on.
CV19 has the huge advantage that there is relatively a tremendous number of willing test subjects available almost immediately when each study phase opens, has lots of funding, and plenty of institutions participating.
And so it is a perfect choice for this case. In honesty there probably is not a safer drug when used as directed and yet there are still concerns (new and known) after 65 years of use.
I am so sorry to hear you had that experience. Do they think it was false reading on your pulse ox?
One way to help ensure correct readings is to make sure your hands are warm, try multiple fingers and leave on until readings are stable (sometimes it takes a short time to get a true reading) and most of all check your actual heart rate and compare with the unit. If they don’t match pretty closely its probably not getting a good reading of your oxygen either.
Or because you are privileged. I need my job to have health insurance (and eat, but I could probably swing a couple of months without salary). I am relatively high risk and my wife is also high risk. Much of my job requires that I am on-site with others. As much as I have changed my non-work life to be safe, I am not in control of the safety level at my job. If i get it, it will be at work, not because I am an idiot.
Similar threads
